This invention relates to a system for continuously providing information on the internet of the power usage at a utility's electric meter. In particular, it relates a system where there is an internet site at which the power usage at the meter can be viewed and at which the utility company can post pricing information for the use of power at said meter, an automatic meter reader that provides continuous information on the power being used at the meter, means for sending information between said automatic meter reader and the internet site, so that the utility can send pricing information to the automatic meter reader and, using that pricing information, the automatic meter reader continuously calculates charges for power usage and can send those charges to the internet site where they can be posted.
The electric utility industry is a major industry nationally and worldwide. It collects several hundred billion dollars annually in revenues. The major focal point in the system is the energy usage bill generated monthly for each user. For the industry, the meter is the cash register that allows the utility to bill and collect revenue from the users, usually on a monthly basis. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually by the utilities to generate, mail out, and collect their bills. This facet of the operation is a capital and labor-intensive operation and streamlining the operation and making the billing operations more efficient would save substantial amounts of money.
The advent of the internet has made it possible for bills to be displayed and paid on the internet, making the billing operation cheaper and more productive for both the company and the customer. The internet is especially conducive to conducting electronic transactions and the design, ubiquitous nature and standard interfaces, i.e. browsers, of the internet make this medium ideally suited for paying bills.
Recently, improvements have been made in the billing process using the internet. Information on power usage that has been collected manually or remotely by the utility is used to compute the customer's monthly bill. The bill is displayed on the company's website so that the user may view it and pay it online if he wishes to. But even when a utility has installed an automatic meter reading (AMR) system at the customer's site, the bill is calculated periodically, normally once each month, but occasionally at shorter intervals. Most or all of the prior billing inventions focus primarily on the last leg of the utility billing chain, the bill presentment phase. The meter phase systems to date either provide information only on a daily update and only in the case of extremely expensive commercial and industrial systems is data available in real time to the individual customers. There is no residential system which can provide real time data today. There is a major need for the integration of the metered data, its collection, recognition, storage, energy use tariff selection, and eventually its presentment and display. It would be advantageous for some customers, however, if they could know on a continuous basis what they owe for power being used so that they can alter operations accordingly. This is especially true when a utility has different rates at different times of the day or during peak usage. In addition, continuous billing may help to detect the theft of power or the loss of power due to shorts or the loss of insulation.